CHAPTER ONE: BLOOD ON MY WEDDING DRESS

"Kill everyone... but bring the bride to me alive."

I thought I had imagined those words. Then the first gunshot shattered the music.

Fifteen minutes earlier, I was laughing.

"Hold still," my father said, straightening the sapphire pendant at my throat. "No daughter of mine walks into an engagement looking nervous."

"I'm not nervous, Papa."

"Your hands say otherwise." He caught my fingers before I could smooth my skirt for the third time. His grip was warm, steady, the same hands that had taught me to hold a knife the right way and pour wine without spilling a drop. "Breathe, Alessia. Tonight the whole city watches you become a Conti."

Behind him, the ballroom of our estate glittered like something out of a dream. Chandeliers threw gold across the marble floor. Servants wove between the tables with trays of champagne, adjusting white orchids that matched my dress. My cousin Bianca shrieked with laughter somewhere near the string quartet, chasing her little brother around a fountain of chocolate.

"You look beautiful, tesoro." My mother appeared at my other side, tucking a loose curl behind my ear. She smelled like jasmine and the powder she'd worn my whole life. "Your grandmother's veil suits you better than it ever suited me."

"You're just saying that."

"I never just say anything." She smiled, and for a moment I saw the girl she must have been, decades ago, standing in a ballroom just like this one. "Tonight, you become someone's whole world. Let him deserve it."

I found Adrian across the room, deep in conversation with two men in dark suits. As if he felt my eyes on him, he looked up, and everything else in the room seemed to dim.

He crossed to me in a few easy strides, took my hand, and pressed his lips to my forehead. "You're staring," he murmured.

"You're impossible not to stare at."

"Careful. I might start believing you actually like me."

"Don't get used to it."

He laughed, low and warm, and for one perfect moment I believed every promise a man could make with his eyes.

"Alessia Moretti." Lorenzo's voice boomed across the room before I saw him, and then he was there, sweeping me into a hug that lifted my heels off the floor. My father's oldest friend, my honorary uncle, the man who'd taught me to ride a bicycle when I was six and skinned both my knees.

"You're going to ruin my dress," I laughed, pushing at his chest.

"I'm going to ruin your father's wine budget before the night is through, that's what I'm going to ruin." He kissed both my cheeks, grinning. "Look at you. All grown up and marrying into the Conti family. Your father must be unbearable with pride."

"He hasn't stopped talking about it in a month."

"Good. He should." Lorenzo squeezed my shoulder, his eyes suspiciously bright. "Your mother, may she rest, would have loved this. Your real mother, I mean, God keep her." He caught himself and glanced at my father, who nodded once, quiet permission. "I only mean — this family deserves a night like this."

I didn't think anything of it then. Why would I?

A guard I didn't recognize leaned close to Lorenzo's ear a few minutes later, whispering something too fast for me to catch. Lorenzo's smile didn't move, but something behind his eyes did. He excused himself and didn't come back.

I noticed it, the way you notice a single cloud crossing an otherwise clear sky. Then Bianca dragged me toward the cake table to admire the sugar flowers, and I forgot.

The music kept playing. My father kept smiling at guests, working the room the way he always did, a hand on every shoulder, a word for every face. But I saw him check his watch twice in a row, and the second time, his smile didn't quite reach his eyes.

"Have you seen Lorenzo?" I asked Adrian, when the crowd thinned enough for us to stand together again.

He didn't look up from his phone. "He'll turn up."

"Adrian."

"Hmm?" He finally glanced at me, and something in his expression flickered, gone before I could name it. "Sorry. Work." He slid the phone into his jacket and took my hand again, but his palm was cold now, damp.

Then the music stopped.

Not faded. Stopped, mid-note, the violinist's bow frozen in the air. The silence that followed was the loudest thing I had ever heard.

"Kill everyone... but bring the bride to me alive."

I thought I had imagined it. Then the first gunshot shattered the music, and the chandelier above the string quartet exploded into a rain of glass and fire.

Screaming replaced the silence. Guests scattered like startled birds, chairs crashing, glasses shattering, someone's grandmother collapsing to her knees beside an overturned table. Smoke rolled in thick gray waves through the doorways. I couldn't find air. I couldn't find up from down.

"Papa!"

He was already moving, already shouting orders at men I'd never seen carrying guns I never knew our house kept. "Get her out! Get her out now!"

"I'm not leaving you—"

"Alessia." He gripped my shoulders so hard it hurt, his eyes wild in a way I had never seen them, not once in nineteen years. "You listen to me. Whatever happens, you run. Do you understand? You run and you do not look back."

"Papa, please—"

A man burst through the smoke behind him, gun raised. My father spun, threw himself between the barrel and my chest, and the shot that was meant for me tore into his shoulder instead.

He didn't fall. He roared, grabbed the attacker by the throat, and drove him back into a table hard enough to splinter wood.

"RUN, ALESSIA!"

I didn't run. My feet had forgotten how to obey me.

I watched blood bloom dark and fast across the white of his shirt, watched him fight three men at once with one arm hanging useless at his side, and somewhere beneath the screaming I heard myself sobbing his name over and over like it was a spell that could undo all of it.

"Alessia."

Adrian's voice. Relief cracked through the terror like sunlight through storm clouds. He'd come for me. He was going to get me out.

I turned, already reaching for him. "Adrian, thank God, we have to help my father, we have to—"

He wasn't reaching back.

He stood perfectly still amid the chaos, gun loose in his hand, and he was smiling. Not the smile from an hour ago, warm and promising forever. This smile had teeth in it.

"Love was never part of the deal," he said.

The words didn't make sense. I stood there with my hand still half-extended toward him, waiting for the joke, waiting for him to laugh and say this was some kind of test, some kind of nightmare I would wake from. He only watched me, the way you'd watch a painting you were deciding whether to keep.

Somewhere behind me, my father screamed my name one final time, and then the sound of it was swallowed by gunfire.

I ran.

I don't remember choosing to. My body simply moved, tearing free of my veil, kicking off my heels, my bare feet slapping against marble slick with blood and shattered glass. Smoke burned my throat. My dress, white an hour ago, now dragged crimson and heavy behind me like something already dead.

I made it to the garden doors. I could see the hedges, the dark safety of the tree line beyond the fountain, freedom so close I could taste the night air.

A hand closed around my hair and yanked me backward off my feet.

I screamed and twisted, clawing at the arm around my waist, sinking my teeth into whatever flesh I could reach. The man cursed and didn't let go. I raked my nails down his face, felt skin give way beneath them, kicked backward until my heel connected with something that made him grunt in pain.

"Feisty," he said through his teeth, and dragged me down anyway.

I fought until my arms shook, until my throat was raw from screaming, until two more sets of hands pinned me to the cold stone of the garden path.

Someone wrenched my head to the side.

"Please," I gasped. "Please, don't—"

A pinch at my throat. Cold, then burning, spreading fast beneath my skin.

The world tilted. The screaming around me smeared into a single long note, the garden lights bleeding into streaks of gold. I fought to keep my eyes open, fought to keep my legs moving even as they buckled beneath me.

Adrian's voice, closer now, strangely gentle. "She's worth far more alive."

Lorenzo's voice answered, and the sound of it broke something in my chest that I knew would never fully heal. "The Devil King will pay a fortune for her."

Lorenzo.

The last thing I saw before the darkness swallowed me whole was my father's blood on the white stone, and my own reflection, ruined and unrecognizable, in the black window of the car they carried me toward.

Then nothing.